For the price of compiling code, developing marketing programs, or securing a service to bridge the cell phone and PDA divide, foodservice rainmakers are tapping social networking, mobile marketing, gaming platforms and viral video channels to bump sales or burnish brands.
By using some of these new channels, marketers may be saving on some of the costs associated with previous levels of spending for such things as direct mail, newspaper inserts or formal focus groups.
Some marketers consider the more valuable benefit of these new technology-dependent channels to be their one-to-one links with consumers. Also valuable to many: the legitimacy they bring to brand messages among the growing number of people spending more time in front of their Web browsers than their televisions or radios.
“Compared to other marketing I’ve done, this is probably the best return [on investment] I’ve received,” Smoothie King franchisee Mitch Rizzello, of RC’s Healthy Creations of Mansfield, Texas, says of communicating with his customers by text message.
Some recent digital marketing news suggesting the potential reach of these new channels:
Burger King Corp. of Miami unveiled a “Whopper Sacrifice” application that offered a coupon for a free Whopper to anyone who dumped 10 “friends” tied to the social network Lexington, Ky.-based Fazoli’s earlier this month debuted on Louisville, Ky.-based Papa John’s International Inc. and cellular carrier AT&T invited nearly 200,000 U.S. consumers to download specialty software that enabled their cell-phone cameras to decode symbols in a direct-mail piece known as 2D bar codes. The end result was that participants’ phones were automatically guided to Papa John’s mobile-device ordering website, where the users were rewarded with a free pizza. German branches of the McDonald’s chain of Oak Brook, Ill., used “Quick Response” codes, similar to 2D bar codes, for their “SMS Lounge” mobile coupon initiative, which had 10,000 participants during a 14-month period, according to a case study published by the Mobile Marketing Association. People who opted in via text message were sent cell phone missives containing the special codes that holders could print out at kiosks inside their local McDonald’s to redeem coupons. Carl’s Jr. of Carpinteria, Calif., and California Tortilla of Rockville, Md., are among the chains using Dairy Queen of Edina, Minn., looking for additional brand exposure and some revenue, licensed its trade dress and some operational insights to the makers of the “DQ Tycoon” time-management video game. Burger King sells video games starring its mascot, The King, and Pizza Hut, Zaxby’s and The Coffee Bean all advertise with virtual restaurants in the car-racing game, “Midnight Club LA.”
“We know that today’s customers, particularly young adults, like to discover brands, and what brands have to offer, for themselves,” Danya Proud, McDonald’s Corp. senior manager of U.S. media relations, says of her company’s interest in some of these new channels. “We are looking at how we can reach these customers where they live, work and play.”